1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for secure transmission of files, which files are generated by a first user at a first client station, which first client station is connected by a first Local Area Network (LAN) to one or more local subordinate servers, which first server performs communication to a number of computer systems connected to the first LAN.
2. Description of Related Art
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2011/0078532 A1 discloses a method and system for providing computer-generated output and in particular graphical output. The system includes a network configured to carry digital information. The system includes a server in communication with the network, the server configured to execute an application and a cloud engine module. The application provides a graphical output. The output capturing and encoding engine module is further configured to intercept the graphical output from the application on the server. The output capturing and encoding engine module is further configured to convert the graphical output into at least one of: graphical commands and video codec data. The output capturing and encoding engine module is further configured to transmit the converted output over the network. The system includes a client in communication with the server over the network, the client configured to execute a graphics and video decoding and rendering engine module. The graphics and video decoding and rendering engine module is configured to, responsive to receiving the transmitted converted output, rendering the graphical output. The graphics and video decoding and rendering engine module is configured to intercept graphics and video decoding and rendering inputs at the client. The graphics and video decoding and rendering engine module is configured to transmit the intercepted user inputs to the output capturing and encoding engine module.
The state of the Art comprises two main areas where print control systems and techniques are applied.
One significant family of print control systems covers standard systems, which provide customer-centric deployment of said print control systems and control of user printing based on capturing the document during the spooling process.
The second family are the cloud based print control systems, where the system is user-centric, i.e. it does focus on providing a print control system features to users leveraging the cloud infrastructure and not imposing any maintenance costs to the organizations such as employers of the said users and often providing different ways of billing and profit generation than by selling software licenses to the customers. Examples of such systems are known under their marketing names Google Cloud Printing, HP ePrint and others.
Traditional Print Control Systems simply do not offer the benefits of the Cloud:
Zero Deployment of the application and services requiring usually no or substantially reduced costs of purchased software, hardware or other resources compared to traditional software and/or hardware products. Different Billing and Payment Models such as pay-per-use pay-per-click, pay-per-view. In the context of the Print Control Systems, this basically means that the purchasing costs of the system for the customer are minimal or non-existent and the whole price of the solution
Current cloud based print control systems bring many benefits typical for other cloud applications to printing, but suffer from additional drawbacks, which complicate or disqualify the deployment of cloud based print control systems in real customer environment. Cloud based print control system has essentially the same purpose as the traditional print control system: to route a user document in a digital form through a series of actions and transformations to the intended or appropriate printer, copier or multi-function printer device by means of so called spooling process. By extension to multi-function printer devices and scanners, the purpose of a print control system cloud-based or traditional is to route a document in hard copy form. The drawbacks of the cloud based print control systems are: Print Job Exposure print jobs are routed to the cloud, i.e. print job data always leave the infrastructure and control of the end user organization. To preserve data integrity and confidentiality print job encryption and digital signature has to be employed, which is today not usual and might be problematic. By deploying an integrity protection mechanism, such as digital signatures, certain features simply cannot be implemented such as print job conversion, grayscale or duplex enforcement, etc. as such transformations need to modify print job data.
Wide Area Network Bandwidth Consumption when print job are transferred back and forth to the cloud. Print jobs can be very large files and their sizes usually vary from MBs to GBs. All these data have to be transferred. Wide Area Network connection usually provides less bandwidth and increased latency when compared to the LAN in most cases, so aside from incurred costs, user experience may also be hampered due to increased waiting times due to increased network latency.
Strong Dependency on the Cloud current cloud based systems rely on the Internet connection and perform all operations online. When network connection to the cloud such as an Internet connection is not working or available, cloud based print control systems cannot provide any services to the users.